Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's
by Ray Kroc
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Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's:
As long as you're green you're growing, as soon as you're ripe you start to rot.
I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night. I
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful individuals with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
There's almost nothing you can't accomplish if you set your mind to it.
Happiness is not a tangible thing, it’s a byproduct of achievement. Achievement must be made against the possibility of failure, against the risk of defeat. It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor. Where there is no risk, there can be no pride in achievement and, consequently, no happiness. The only way we can advance is by going forward, individually and collectively, in the spirit of the pioneer. We must take the risks involved in our free enterprise system. This is the only way in the world to economic freedom. There is no other way.
You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well.
There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. —Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
I’ve always dealt fairly in business, even when I believed someone was trying to take advantage of me. That’s one reason I have had to grind away incessantly to achieve success. In some ways I guess I’m naive. I always take a man at his word unless he’s given me a reason not to, and I’ve worked out many a satisfactory deal on the strength of a handshake. On the other hand, I’ve been taken to the cleaners often enough to make me a certified cynic.
I believe that if you think small, you’ll stay small. Getting
A little bit of luck helps, yes, but the key element, which too many in our affluent society have forgotten, is still hard work—grinding it out. Ray
You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well. We demonstrated this emphasis on details, and saw it pay off, in our approach to hamburger patties.
In essence, the message was always the same, “I want one of those mixers of yours like the McDonald brothers have in San Bernardino, California.” I got curiouser and curiouser. Who were these McDonald brothers, and why were customers picking up on the Multimixer from them when I had similar machines in lots of places? (The machine, by this time had five spindles instead of six.) So I did some checking and was astonished to learn that the McDonalds had not one Multimixer, not two or three, but eight! The mental picture of eight Multimixers churning out forty shakes at one time was just too much to be believed. These mixers sold at $150 apiece, mind you, and that was back in 1954.
I had left Florida in the nick of time, it turned out. The business decline that began when the real estate boom collapsed caught up with the nightclubs soon after I left. The Silent Night closed its gates for good. Palm Island popped into the news once in a while as time went by. Al Capone built a home there. Then Lou Walters, father of TV’s Barbara Walters, opened the Latin Quarter. But it was to be a long time before I saw Florida again.
One night the revenue agents outmaneuvered the Palm Island security men and we all wound up in jail. I was mortified. My parents would disown me if they found out I had been put in jail with a bunch of common violators of the prohibition law. We were only there three hours, but it was one of the most uncomfortable 180-minute periods of my life. That
I refused to worry about more than one thing at a time, and I would not let useless fretting about a problem, no matter how important, keep me from sleeping. This is easier said than done.
if you believe in something, you've got to be in it to the ends of your toes. Taking reasonable risks in part of the challenge. It;s the fun.
When I flew back to Chicago that fateful day in 1954, I had a freshly signed contract with the McDonald brothers in my briefcase. I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action. I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns. But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.
I had to twist Harold Freund’s arm repeatedly to get him to build a bakery just to service our California stores. Freund now has the largest, most automated bun plant in the world. It produces eight thousand buns an hour for McDonald’s. It also has a plant in St. Petersburg serving all of Florida, and another serving all of Hawaii. Fred
One of the things I did differently was to make my milkshakes with a soft product drawn from a tank, instead of hand-dipping ice cream. This changed the layout and gave us more space. One major problem in adapting the California-style building to the Midwestern climate was ventilation. I brought in architectual consultants one after the other in an attempt to solve the problem of exhausting the stale air and replacing it with fresh cool or heated air.
Supplying buns to McDonald’s was the break of a lifetime for many of these men. Mary Ann Bakery, for example, was a small organization when it started dealing with us. Now it has a plant with a quarter-mile-long conveyor belt for cooling buns after they’re baked. The firm uses more than a million pounds of flour a month to make buns for us. Mary Ann also has a trucking company that services McDonald’s.
I have often been asked to explain the methods I use in choosing executives, because much of the success of my organization has been a result of the kind of people I have picked for key positions. My answers aren’t very satisfying; they don’t sound much different than the rules that students of business administration find in their basic textbooks. It’s hard to come up with real answers because the weight of the judgment is not in the rule but in the application. As a result, I have sometimes been accused of being arbitrary.
An equally unusual thing happened in 1953 when the McDonalds were designing their “golden arches” building. They wanted to lay it out in the most efficient way possible, placing windows and equipment so that each crew member’s job could be done with a minimum number of steps. Mac and Dick had a tennis court behind their house, and they got Art Bender and a couple of other operations people up there to draw out the whole floor plan with chalk, actual size, like a giant hopscotch.
In Sarasota, Florida, they ran into a health department ruling that deemed it unsanitary to prepare milk shakes and hamburgers in the same room. In our units, of course, the shakes were made close by the griddles, and it would have been prohibitively expensive to redesign our structure. Syg Chakow came up with the idea of building a glass partition with an inside door so that the shakes and hamburgers could be prepared in separate rooms, yet served to customers through a single window. The health department was satisfied, and our operator was greatly relieved. Harry,
the basics have to be stressed over and over. If I had a brick for every time I’ve repeated the phrase QSC and V (Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value), I think I’d probably be able to bridge the Atlantic Ocean with them. And the operators need the stress on fundamentals as much as their managers and crews. This is especially true of a new location. So
I had memorized the procedure when I watched the McDonald’s operation in San Bernardino, and I had done it exactly the same way. I went through the whole thing once more. The result was the same—bland, mushy french fries. They were as good, actually, as the french fries you could buy at other places. But that was not what I wanted.
But there was one other agreement they hadn’t told me about, and that was for Cook County, Illinois, where I had my home, my office, and my first model store. The brothers had sold Cook County to the Frejlack Ice Cream Company interest for $5,000! It cost me $25,000 to buy that area from the Frejlacks, and it was blood money. I could not afford it. I was already in debt for all I was worth. I couldn’t blame the Frejlacks, of course, they were completely aboveboard and fair. But I could never forgive the McDonalds. Unwittingly or not, they had made an ass of me—in the Biblical sense. I’d been blindfolded by their assurances and led to grind like blind Samson in the prison house. My
One of my suppliers told me, “Ray, you know you aren’t in the hamburger business at all. You’re in the french-fry business. I don’t know how the livin’ hell you do it, but you’ve got the best french fries in town, and that’s what’s selling folks on your place.
I detailed it all, and when I got to the point where they stored them in the shaded chicken-wire bins, he said, “That’s it!” He went on to explain that when potatoes are dug, they are mostly water. They improve in taste as they dry out and the sugars change to starch. The McDonald brothers had, without knowing it, a natural curing process in their open bins, which allowed the desert breeze to blow over the potatoes. With the help of the potato people, I devised a curing system of my own. I had the potatoes stored in the basement so the older ones would always be next in line for the kitchen. I also put a big electric fan down there and gave the spuds a continuous blast of air, which greatly amused Ed MacLuckie. “We have the world’s most pampered potatoes,” he said. “I almost feel guilty about cooking them.
Sometimes Ed MacLuckie would have forgotten to turn the sign on when dusk began to fall, and that made me furious. Or maybe the lot would have some litter on it that Ed said he hadn’t had time to pick up. Those little things didn’t seem to bother some people, but they were gross affronts to me. I’d get screaming mad and really let Ed have it. He took it in good part. I know he was as concerned about these details as I was, because he proved it in his own stores in later years. But perfection is very difficult to achieve, and perfection was what I wanted in McDonald’s. Everything else was secondary for me.
A subject of much greater concern to me, however, was the great french-fry flop. I had explained to Ed MacLuckie with great pride the McDonald’s secret for making french fries. I showed him how to peel the potatoes, leaving just a bit of the skin to add flavor.
